Justin Webb's America

Charm and politics

• Justin Webb
• 8 Nov 07, 09:15 PM GMT

I cannot decide whether "tip-gate" is nonsense or not. It was NPR who revealed, in a typically solid and un-flashy piece of follow-up journalism, that the hard-working and hard-up woman who served Hillary Clinton at a restaurant in Iowa recently, and whose life story the candidate later used in her speech, had not been left a tip. At least that was what the waitress herself said.

In a follow-up to the follow-up, the Associated Press revealed that the restaurant owner had been left a tip which through some mistake had not been shared out, and it was not a bad one: $100 on a total bill of $157! So no story. And yet ... the NPR piece had also followed-up a terribly sad case of a woman whose brother is suffering from cancer and who had turned up at a Barack Obama rally looking for solace. The candidate had addressed her, and held her hand. He kind of promised to write the brother a note as well ("if I have time") but, you guessed it, the note never came. And yet this woman refused to be even slightly cross. "I do the same thing with friends of mine," she said.

Now here is the point: the Clinton story has the candidate looking bad even though she actually behaved just fine; the Obama story ends with the candidate genuinely forgiven and honoured though, frankly, he fell down on the job. Does this tell us something bigger and more important about charm and politics? Such as, you either have it or you don't and money (or even a good tip badly administered) cannot buy it?

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The Ron Paul argument

• Justin Webb
• 8 Nov 07, 06:39 PM GMT

Let's take the Ron Paul bull by the horns. I like the fellow: I have just been watching him clashing with the Chairman of the Fed, Ben Bernanke. He made, as he often does, a kind of "emperor's new clothes" case; arguing that US interest rates have been artificially low for many years, the result of which has been to debauch the currency and store up future crises in the US economy.

Ben Bernanke pointed out that a worker paid in dollars and spending in dollars does not suffer from a fall in the dollar's price abroad (unless he buys imported goods) but in a sense he and the congressman were not addressing the same subject; Ron Paul talks very big picture. And his voice is an interesting one. (In case anyone hasn't heard of him we are talking about the libertarian Republican candidate, who is best known as the sole Republican opponent of the Iraq war.)

To me he is a wonderful reminder of the intellectual freedom that persists in American politics in spite of the deadening effect of money. I have written before about the need for those of us with claims to impartiality to treat those the parties regard as fringe candidates seriously; it is not for us to attack or defend, but to report and analyse.

But there is a risk, isn't there, that the voices backing these candidates become shrill, and annoy those they ought to be courting. Have we reached that stage? Not for me to say, of course...

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